Cézanne and 19th-century art scholar, curator and museum director.
Novotny was born into a Roman Catholic family, his father Franz Novotny,
worked as a mechanic and his mother was Josefine Bartosch (Novotny). He studied
under Josef Strzygowski (q.v.) at Strzygowski's competing school of art history
within the university in Vienna, the
Wiener Institut.
Novotny wrote his
dissertation in 1927 on Romanesque sculpture and churches in Austria. He worked
between
1928-39 as Assistant at the Kunsthistorischen Institut in Vienna. His Romanische Bauplastik in Österreich
established a strong interregional connection. Novotny, like a number of other
Strzygowski students, was able to incorporate the rigorous research method of
his mentor without the fanaticism, often racial in its conception, that marred
his mentor's work. Novotny shied away from the broad generalizations. In 1939 he
was appointed curator at
the Österreichische Galerie in Vienna. From 1948 onward he was professor at the
University. After the war, he became director of the Galerie from 1961-68.
During his tenure, Novotny worked to repatriate works of art added to the
Gallery during the post-war period to their rightful owners, including works
owned by Alma Mahler-Werfel (he was turned down by the Austrian Education
Minister, Erwin Thalhammer). Despite his training in Romanesque art, most of Novotny's publications deal
with modern artists because of his appointment at the Österreichische Galerie. His
book on Anton Romako redefined the artist as a precursor to Expressionism and Gustav Klimt.

Novotny was a key figure for Modernism because of his
analytical precision in the work of Cézanne. Cézanne und das Ende der
wissenschaftlichen Perspektive (1938) placed the artist within an strong
intellectual tradition.
Novotny use painter's works to establish a criteria for an art historical
process useful for the who era of modernism. That book is his clearest use of
Strukturanalyse of the Vienna School to which his thought belongs. Novotny
argued that Cézanne the tension between "scientific" or natural perspective and
the artist's willful altering of it makes Cézanne a pivotal entity in
Impressionism. His work influenced Meyer Schapiro (q.v.) and other Cézanne
scholars. His Pelican History of Art volume, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1780 to 1880, is notable for the way it
treats artists as individual
personalities, eschewing national characteristics less common to modern-era
artists. The Pelican volume omitted Russian artists because Novotny did not consider
Russia as part of Europe.
Novotny emphasized the role that Idealism played in 19th-century Europe.
Philosophy was key to Novotny; he used Kant (specifically the Critique
of Pure Reason, [Kritik der reinen Vernunft]) to explain Cezanne's
work. His emphasis of the intellectual milieu of artistic production was not at
the cost of the artwork's formal aspects. Novotny was not a social
historian, however. He avoided biographical and other documents when no
direct connection could be made to the art.